Video interviewing has become increasingly popular in today's digital world. Beginning as a way of cutting costs for flights, travel, and hotel stays, video interviewing has grown in popularity due to its convenience and ease of use. The COVID-19 pandemic solidified video interviewing as a standard practice for most businesses as stay-at-home orders eliminated the ability to travel on a global scale.

There are many upsides to video interviewing. You can save time and money, as well as get a better sense of the candidate than you could from a phone or in-person interview. Another benefit of video interviewing is the ability to conduct an interview in the same environment in which remote candidates will work. This advantage can open up a larger talent pool and allow you to access more opportunities than ever before and give you access to talent anywhere in the world.

However, video interviews also require a bit of extra effort from the interviewers and candidates need to be aware of some key differences between traditional interviewing processes and how to best prepare for them. Here are video interview tips to get the most from your interviews:

1. Pay attention to your environment and sound quality: Choose a quiet, distraction-free space with good lighting and a stable internet connection. Also, be aware of any background noise that may interfere with audio quality.

2. Dress appropriately: Make sure to dress professionally. We've all seen the hilarious video of people on Zoom interviews, without pants who do something unexpected like drop coffee in their lap or have to chase a dog out of the room and end up in boxers on camera. You may not need a suit, but definitely put on pants... the internet will meme you if you don't.

3. Check your connections. A good habit with any remote technology is to spend 3- 5 minutes before any interview making sure you're properly connected to all your tech. This can start with a wifi or noise-canceling headphone check and end with a quick test video to view lighting and sound quality before your call.

4. Make sure you have a framework or process to follow ahead of time: It doesn't have to be a word-for-word script, but interviewers should have a good opener; an ice breaker for example, hiring criteria, a list of questions, a space for candidate questions, and next steps outlined before you ever get on a call.  This will help keep the conversation both efficient and engaging.

Sample video interview questions and answers to consider are:

- Tell me about how you see this role fitting into your ideal career map.
- What experiences in your last role prepared you for this one?
- Describe a time when you had a conflict with a teammate, customer, or contractor. How were you able to resolve it.
- What do you think makes you uniquely qualified for this role?
- What specific questions do you have about our company, product, or this role?
- How would your current and previous colleagues describe your work style and team spirit?

The answers an applicant gives to the questions above should give you a good idea of their capabilities and how they fit into your company's culture. Be sure to listen closely, ask follow-up questions, and provide constructive feedback throughout the interview.

If you'd like to see Pillar's library of over 1000 questions specific to the roles you're hiring for, chat with someone on our team to see how you can use them in your interviews. Pillar's interview intelligence software is helping companies revolutionize hiring through Ai.

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Video Interview Questions and Answers

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As an analytics and Ai company that builds software for hiring managers and recruiters, one of the questions we're asked constantly is, "What questions should I ask in video interviews?"

At Pillar, we believe that the best video interview questions are semi-structured, equitable, behavioral, and most of all tailored to the job for which you’re hiring. You should ask questions that will help you understand the candidate's experience, abilities, and motivations - but don't forget to cover things like work style, team, and culture fit. This gives you a multi-faceted perspective of the candidate - which helps you make great hiring decisions.

Here are some example video interview questions and answers that you could use:

Question: "Describe a project that challenged you. Tell me about the project and how you overcame the challenges that you faced".

Answer: "I was recently assigned a project to create an automated system for managing our customer data. I had no prior knowledge of the language that the system needed to be written in and was overwhelmed at first. However, I decided to break the project down into smaller tasks and research how each task could be completed. By doing this, I was able to gain the knowledge that I needed and complete the project on time."

Question: "Describe how you work with a team or collaborate with colleagues".

Answer: "I'm an effective collaborator and love working on teams. I believe communication is key to successful teamwork, so I make sure to be clear about the budget, timelines, milestones, scope, and expectations from the start. I also appreciate constructive feedback and enjoy working together with the team to come up with creative solutions to difficult problems."

Question: "What specific skills have you gained in your past positions helped to prepare you for this role?"

Answer: "My previous positions have given me experience in project management, customer service, and data analysis. These skills are essential to this role as I will be responsible for managing multiple projects at once, interacting with customers on a regular basis, and analyzing data to identify trends and gain insights."

These questions should help you get started on creating your own set of questions for conducting video interviews. If you'd like like to save time, Pillar's interview intelligence has questions baked into the platform that you can select as prompts to use in video interviews.

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Pre-Recorded Video Interview Questions

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A pre-recorded video interview is one that a candidate records and sends back to you. Pre-recorded video interviews are often best for the early stages of the interview process where you're assessing a large candidate pool and may not have the time to interview each candidate individually - and eliminated many of the time constraints of distance, for instance being on opposite time zones.

To kick off the pre-recorded interview, a candidate will be sent a link to record, review, and submit their video interview answering questions that were sent to them by an interviewer. If this a preferred method of interviewing for you and your organization, Here are some example pre-recorded video interview questions and answers to get you started:

Question: "What are the most important qualities that you bring to a team?"

This is one of my favorite questions because it forces a person to show self-awareness, brevity, and humility, and if asked early in the interviewing process, it allows you to begin identifying whether or not this person is truly a fit for your team and culture.

An answer like: "I believe my most important quality is caring deeply about people. In addition, I'm a great communicator and listener, have a growth mindset, and am able to think outside the box - which means I'm good at solving complex problems and can be trusted with big projects. I'm also well-versed in collaborating with others and thrive when working on a team.”

If that response is true, wouldn't you love to have this person on your team? Another question that I absolutely love, and have asked executives and ICs (individual contributors) is:

Question: "If your previous team knew for certain that you'd never hear their response what do you think they would say about you?"

Questions like these are powerful, especially to look back on when you're checking references. If they said something like, "I'm a really amazing communicator and love spending time with the team," and the references you check say, "We never heard from them, never knew where they were at on a project, they rarely showed up to meetings, and never participated in team experiences," you could easily see what's true and what's not.

This question also allows the person to reflect on their own performance, strengths, and weaknesses - and provides you with an insight into how this person thinks about themselves. The answer should also demonstrate a good sense of self-awareness, enough ego to get the job done well with an expectation of excellence, and the humility to realize that they're not perfect.

These are just a few examples of questions that you can consider asking in a pre-recorded video interview. It's important to customize the questions based on the role, your organization's culture, and what qualities you're looking for in an ideal candidate. The goal is to have a clear picture by the end of the interview process of whether or not this candidate is right for your team.

Pillar was built to help you hire better. Our interview intelligence software is powered by Ai and used by brands like High Alpha and Wistia to analyze, evaluate and score candidates based on their responses during interviews. Our software creates a personalized interview experience and can help you make better hiring decisions faster. To find out how Pillar can help you with your video interviewing process, book a free demo today!